Netflix’s Pine Gap season 1, episode 3 recap

Rudi and Kath gather intel on the A-crew to find out which one of them compromised the servers and leaked intelligence on Netflix’s Pine Gap. Who could the traitor be?

Jasmina Delic (Tess Haubrich) is taking her secret task seriously, gleaning from her many encounters with Gus Thompson (Parker Sawyers) that he believes the Rohingyans were behind the missile attack in the pilot episode of Pine Gap. She reports the same to her bosses, Kath Sinclair (Jacqueline McKenzie) and Jacob Kitto (Stephen Curry) who are not ready to rest on their laurels yet.

Ethan James (Steve Toussaint) has set up a system to identify who is using the collections room terminal with the malware. But, to track the usage, either he, Kath or Rudi Fox (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) will have to stay with the tablet. This is possible while the A-crew is doing day shifts, but it will look suspicious if the three bosses start staying overnight. Which means they have 12 days to get the job done.

The three of them decide the best way to identify the culprit is by understanding the crew’s personal situations, thereby leading them to possible motives. Kath decides to have an impromptu get-together at her place but advises against Ethan attending.

While the A-crew conjecture about Chinese politics, it seems Simon Penny (Sachin Joab) is pre-occupied. Up till now on Pine Gap, he’s been effervescent and attentive, so this is a marked change in his personality. Kath and Rudi’s curiosity is piqued when Jas tells them at the evening party that Simon has gone home to Skype with his family.

Kath and Rudi keep their ears open for information on the A-crew. Turns out Jas speaks Lao despite claiming to have only visited one country abroad (the US). Laos is where Deb Vora (Alice Keohavong) is from and she has been struggling a little bit with rebelling against her father’s pacifism and joining the army. She is also uncomfortable with the cloak-and-dagger existence of working at Pine Gap, which she reveals to Eloise Chambers (Edwina Wren). Eloise has a Ph.D. from Stanford, but her high-achieving parents means that she suffers from deep insecurity. It doesn’t help that every time Eloise applies for a promotion she is ignored; that can’t be doing her ego any favours.

Simon finally arrives at the party, and immediately starts talking about his financial problems. He has four children to put through school, but doesn’t have the option to send them to the free public schools in Australia – instead, his children attend his wife’s alma mater, and that’s placed him in deep debt.

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Though Gus and Jas are essentially each other’s ‘marks’, they’re still taking their relationship seriously and have to consider the documentation they would need to file if they made it public. Gus had also confided in her about being denied the transfer to Denver, and Jas had told him about her Serbian parents being killed by the Kosovo Liberation Army.

As she’s cleaning up after the party, Jas tells Kath that the KLA were terrorists till America decided they could use them to overthrow the government. This meant that the six men who killed her parents were all trained by the CIA.

After the party is over, Rudi asks Kath for her office passcode as the three of them had agreed they would jot down all information by hand and hide it there. She is reluctant before he reminds her that she can change the code the following day. As expected, Rudi takes this opportunity to sneak into her files. He and Ethan have been suspicious of Jacob Kitto, so this is the only way he can find out more about him.

The next morning, Gus is back to second-guessing the Rohingya theory. The hypothesis is based on the fact that a journalist onboard, Lwin, had spotted a local rapist and reported it to her editor. Rudi then checked the editor’s records and it shows that he messaged Chinese intelligence almost immediately after receiving her text. Surely, that kind of news isn’t worth their time. Gus can’t understand why Jas isn’t curious about this incident, and Jas keeps trying to deflect his suspicions because she has been ordered to keep the Americans at bay regarding the missile attack by Kath and Jacob.

Rudi has discovered that Jacob is Kath’s soon-to-be-ex-husband; that explains the animosity between them. He and Ethan decide to keep it quiet so that Ethan can use it as his ace-in-the-hole when he wants to. Unknown to Rudi, however, Kath has figured out that he was snooping on her computer. He moved her mouse, and she noticed.

The big three breakdown the possible motives of the suspects:

Simon – Money

Deb – Ideology

Eloise – Ego

Jas – Grudge

Gus – Grudge

Moses Dreyfus – Grudge, Ego

Ethan still doesn’t think Moses is a likely suspect, and given how blatant Simon and Eloise were about their issues, these three are set aside. So, who could the traitor be? Rudi thinks it’s Jas, and Kath thinks it’s Gus. Rudi then confronts Kath about her long-standing relationship with Jas – she was her first boss and Jas seems to have set her path for Pine Gap since she was 15. Nothing has ever got in her way and now at the age of 29, she is a team leader at one of the best American intelligence agencies. This from a girl who indirectly blames the CIA for killing her family. Gus’ demotion doesn’t even compare. Rudi is adamant Jas was behind the information leak.

While monitoring the POTUS’ meeting with the Chinese Chairman, Gus comes to the realisation that Lwin’s message said ‘CoS’ had some explosive news. He thinks it means that she spotted information on the Australian Chief of Staff, Robert Boyle’s phone. This can’t be something the two of them can brush under the carpet any longer.

Curious to get to the bottom of this, Jas remotely logs into Boyle’s phone and finds a flagged email to the Australian Prime Minister Philip Burke. Should she click it? This isn’t authorised or legal. But the truth is at stake. She opens the mail, but Jacob Kitto is behind her.